MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Thief’ Closes Circle on ‘400 Blows’

When he made “The 400 Blows” in 1959, Francois Truffaut wanted the film to contain a parallel story of a girl delinquent a few years older than his autobiographical 13-year-old hero, Antoine Doinel. Although he eventually erased her from “The 400 Blows,” Truffaut apparently never obliterated the girl from his mind.

Over the years, he accumulated more material for the character of Janine, who was, according to letters in his recently published “Correspondence,” based partly on the first woman he lived with when he was 17. A year before his death, Truffaut asked his close friend and co-scriptwriter, Claude de Givray, to work with him on the material, and at Truffaut’s death, in 1984, a 35-page treatment existed.

That passed to producer-director Claude Berri (“Manon of the Spring”), who chose director Claude Miller (“The Best Way,” “Garde a Vue”)--in his earlier years an assistant to Truffaut as well as to Jean-Luc Godard--to adapt the final screenplay and to direct it. (Miller’s fellow screenwriters were his wife Annie Miller and Luc Beraud.)

All this is prologue to “The Little Thief” (at the Royal), a fine, beautiful film, deceptively simple and marvelously subtle, which bears traces of both film makers’ sensibilities. If it is a closing of the circle that began with Antoine Doinel, it may also be a first step down the road traveled with Janine Castang.

Perhaps, to Truffaut’s Doinel films, we will someday add one or two more in the Castang series by director Miller. He has already made one earlier feature with “The Little Thief’s” remarkable star, Charlotte Gainsbourg, the 1985 “L’Effrontee” (“Charlotte and Lulu”).

A great deal of “The Little Thief” depends on your reaction to Gainsbourg, since the narrative rests entirely with her. Flat-nosed and thick-maned, with a look that is sullen or lost by turns, she also possesses a shy smile whose unfolding can twist the heart. Frankly, it took seeing the film twice to appreciate completely the delicacy and bruised sensibilities with which Gainsbourg invests Janine, a waif whose life is spent making excuses for the mother who abandoned her.

We meet Janine in 1950. The postwar era is conjured up in a few seconds of newsreels: the giddy celebration after the liberation of Paris, the shaved heads of pretty Nazi collaborators, even now smiling defiantly for the cameras. Janine’s missing mother was possibly one of those. Having “fooled around” with Nazi officers during the war, she has lit out, leaving her little daughter with an older uncle and his shrill younger wife in a poor provincial town that might be straight out of “Small Change.”

As though it were her due, Janine begins by stealing cash from schoolmates’ lockers and graduates to boosting real silk panties, fox stoles and cigarette cases from unwary shopkeepers. It is, as we see poignantly enough, a clumsy attempt at badges of adulthood: All around her she sees Yanks and compliant French girls; what she sees in the mirror is not reassuring. For moral instruction, she has the local movie screen and a rudderless existence at home with her adulterous aunt and belittled uncle. (A nice detail is her rough uncle’s skill at drawing, his real passion. He’s a rich character, richly played by Raoul Billerey.)

Caught after a brazen theft from the village church, she is given a chance: a job as a maid in a neighboring city. While working for this earnest, well-to-do young couple, the Longuets, she meets someone Truffaut may have intended as a harsh self-portrait: Michel Davenne (Didier Bezace), a 43-year-old married man who cloaks his pleasure in having a 17-year-old mistress in his virtue in being her teacher and “protector.”

One of “The Little Thief’s” intricacies is in its even-handedness with so many of its characters: Janine’s uncle; young Mme. Longuet; Michel. Simultaneously we see how Janine could charm this bookish provincial, how she would genuinely try to turn herself into his vision of her as a modest, accomplished secretary, and how a moment of real lust could blow this whole mentor/mistress game apart in a second. (The film is MPAA-rated R for adult themes.)

It happens soon enough: Janine falls for the worst type. Do they not always--didn’t we all, at 17? The ferrety Raoul (Simon de la Brosse), roughly her age, is a would-be motocross competitor and a worse crook than she; he hasn’t even mastered his movie shtick, flipping a cigarette into his mouth. And he brazenly blames his brief impotence on the fact that he needs two sheets, top and bottom, and a real bed, for a proper setting.

But she invests all her starved feelings in his vision of grand passion; soon she’s parroting his contempt for the straight life and a straight job and stealing for him on a grand scale. With what unfolds next, this could be as bleak a story as Agnes Varda’s “Vagabond,” yet it’s not. Miller, with a delicate and magical touch, introduces cameras and photography into the equation, his own addition to Truffaut’s text: if you wish, the “photography” that lured Truffaut into the world of cinema. Janine stumbles into it in the least likely place--a Catholic-run girl’s reformatory--from a kindred, defiant soul, Mauricette (Nathalie Cardone, in the film’s one searing performance).

The freeze-frame conclusion of “The 400 Blows” was intentionally ambiguous but not promising. You cannot help but take heart as the road lifts at the end of “The Little Thief,” and that amazing a cappella chorus that framed the opening credits reappears again with its cheeky marching song. (We know now it is the choral group Michel directs.)

Things did not go swimmingly for Truffaut’s first mistress; somehow Miller allows us to hope for more for Janine. We want to believe the film’s text, that with her camera--and in spite of her encumbrances--Janine would steal nothing more than images in the future.